The Nutrition Gap: Why Active People Are Running on Empty
You train consistently and eat what most people would describe as a healthy diet. You take your recovery seriously. And yet something feels off, your energy levels don't quite match your effort. You feel like its slower for you to recover and your performance has plateaued despite putting your all in.
Before you add another training session or cut another food group, I want to ask you a different question. "What if the problem isn't how hard you're working, but what your body is actually getting to work with?".
There is a concept in nutritional science called the nutrition gap. It describes the difference between the micronutrients we consume and the levels our bodies need to function optimally. And the evidence suggests that this gap is wider than most of us realise and, more importantly for active people, the consequences are showing up in ways we have been taught to grind through it - all about grit right?
The Food on Your Plate Isn't What It Used to Be
A UK study published in 2022 analysed the mineral content of fruits and vegetables across three editions of the Composition of Foods Tables spanning 1940, 1991, and 2019. It found that over that 80-year period, iron content in vegetables declined by 50%, copper by 49%, and sodium by 52%. These are not marginal changes. This is the food on our plates, today, compared to what our grandparents were eating.
The causes are multiple and compounding: intensive farming practices that prioritise yield over nutritional density, the dilution effect of growing crops faster than soil minerals can be replenished, and food processing that strips away what little remains. The result is that even someone eating a wide variety of whole foods is working with ingredients that are nutritionally depleted compared to previous generations.
And here is where it particularly relevant for active people. We are simultaneously eating food that contains less AND because we are doing more, we need more.
The Athlete Paradox
Exercise increases your micronutrient requirements significantly. When you train, you sweat, and with that sweat goes magnesium, calcium, potassium and zinc. You generate oxidative stress that increases your need for antioxidant nutrients. Your energy metabolism runs faster and harder, placing greater demands on the B vitamins that support every step of that process. Your muscles are breaking down and rebuilding, requiring adequate iron for oxygen transport, vitamin D for muscle function, and zinc for protein synthesis and recovery.
You train more, your body needs more - period. Yet research consistently shows that many athletes, particularly those managing their weight, following restrictive dietary patterns, or simply not eating enough to match their output and falling short of even basic micronutrient requirements.
A particularly important finding from the research is this: low energy availability (LEA) is itself a driver of micronutrient deficiency. When you don't eat enough overall, you don't eat enough of anything, including the vitamins and minerals that make training worthwhile. This creates a compounding problem. You train hard, under-fuel, deplete your micronutrient stores, and then wonder why your body isn't responding the way you expect.
If you've been following my recent content on REDs and LEA, you will recognise this pattern immediately. Under-fuelling isn't just about missing calories, it's about missing the building blocks your body needs at every level.
What the Body Does When It Doesn't Have Enough
Professor Bruce Ames, a leading biochemist, proposed what is known as the Triage Theory, the idea that when the body faces even moderate deficiency in a single nutrient, it makes triage decisions. It prioritises short-term survival and immediate function over long-term health and repair. Processes that keep you alive today take precedence over processes that keep you healthy in ten years.
For athletes, this is not abstract. It shows up as fatigue that doesn't shift with sleep, recovery that takes longer than it should, hormonal disruption, mood that is harder to manage, and a gradual erosion of the performance gains you are working so hard to achieve. It can also show up as increased injury risk, compromised immune function, and bone health that is silently declining beneath the surface.
What I find particularly interesting in my practice is the pattern of when illness tends to arrive. So many of my clients stay standing through the hardest blocks of training and then get hit with a cold, a virus or flu the moment they slow down, take a break, or go on holiday. It is a pattern I see repeatedly, and it speaks to exactly this. The body, running on insufficient reserves, holds itself together through sheer demand and adrenaline and the moment the pressure lifts, the immune system finally gets the message that it has been running on empty. The holiday isn't what made you ill. The accumulated deficit is what made you ill. The holiday just gave your body permission to show it.
What This Means in Practice
The solution is not a single supplement or a quick fix. It starts, as it always does, with food, specifically with the quality, variety and volume of what you are eating. Whole foods, as close to their original form as possible, eaten in amounts that actually support the demands you are placing on your body. This is the foundation and nothing replaces it.
This is also where food quality becomes part of the conversation and I want to be honest that I hold a strong personal belief in regenerative farming and buying organic where possible. The evidence around soil health, farming practices and nutrient density supports this. But I also live in the real world and I know that organic everything is not an option for most people. So rather than an all-or-nothing approach, I'd encourage you to prioritise where it matters most.
The Dirty Dozen is a useful starting point, an annually updated list of the fruits and vegetables with the highest pesticide residues, where choosing organic makes the most meaningful difference. For meat and fish, sourcing from regenerative or sustainable producers when budget allows is worth the investment, the nutritional profile of grass-fed meat and wild-caught fish differs meaningfully from intensively farmed equivalents. I have popped some useful resources below to get you started.
However, let's be honest, even for people with their nutrition dialled in, the evidence suggests that the gap is real. A high-quality, bioavailable supplement, one formulated to optimum levels rather than minimum RDA thresholds, and ideally in a food-state form that the body recognises, can act as genuine nutritional insurance. It's NOT a substitute for good eating, but a meaningful addition on top of it.
In my practice at Empowering Nutrition, I work with practitioner-grade supplement brands specifically because formulation quality matters. Not all supplements are equivalent. The form a nutrient takes, the dose, and whether it is presented to the body in a recognisable, bioavailable way will all affect whether it actually does anything. In the coming weeks I will be going deep on individual micronutrients — iron, magnesium, vitamin D, zinc and B vitamins and what the research says about each one in the context of training and performance.
Because you are not just training your body. You are asking it to do something extraordinary. It deserves the fuel to match.
If you'd like to explore what your own nutrition picture looks like and where the gaps might be, this is exactly the work I do at Empowering Nutrition.
Get in touch to start the conversation.
Useful Resources
A UK sustainable meat provider (Knepp Farms, Primal Meats, Coombe Farm Organic)
The Marine Stewardship Council - use their tool to find MSC-certified sustainable fish anywhere in the UK
A sustainable fish source (Sole of Discretion, Eversfield Organic) Ethical Seafood Research)
References
Fitt E et al. Historical changes in the mineral content of fruit and vegetables in the UK from 1940 to 2019: a concern for human nutrition and agriculture. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition. 2022.
Alaunyte I et al. Micronutrients and athletic performance: A review. Food and Chemical Toxicology. 2022.
Ames BN. Triage Theory. https://www.bruceames.org/Triage.pdf
Gallant TL et al. Low Energy Availability and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine. 2024. doi:10.1007/s40279-024-02130-0
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